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(More customer reviews)`Bruce Aidells' Complete Sausage Book' by meat and sausage experts Aidells and Denis Kelly is the third book by Aidells I have reviewed and it easily maintains the consistently high quality I have come to expect from this writing team on the subject of meat. Along with the team of Schlesinger and Willoughby, they seem to be the reigning kings among culinary writers on the subject of meat, more especially on the subject of pork and sausage.
For starters, I strongly recommend this book for all people interested in reading about food and in cooking, even if you have no interest in making sausage yourself. In many ways, it is as good as the recently published book `Charcuterie' by the team of culinary journalist Michael Ruhlman and charcuterie expert and chef, Brian Poleyn, if only because Aidells and Kelly are better at staying focused on their primary topic. `Charcuterie' is very good, but if what you really want to know about is sausage, Aidells and Kelly are much better.
One thing these two books do for me is to completely reassess my opinion of Emeril Lagasse and his `Pork Fat Rules' mantra. It is so easy to take this as bluster, yet both books in one voice say that pork fat is the cream of the crop when it comes to animal fats. Beef suet is too grainy and chicken fat melts at too low a temperature to be useful for a lot of cooking applications for which pork fat is so good.
It is important to note that while this book does touch on the subjects of smoked and cured sausages, its primary subject by far is fresh sausage that you can make at home. Next to the affirmation of pork fat, I was most pleasantly surprised by the great variety of fresh sausage recipes and in the antiquity of so many of these varieties. It is easy to believe that hot and sweet Italian sausage and German bratwurst and Spanish chorizo and Polish Kielbasa have been around a long time and it is not unexpected to find that the Cajun specialties boudin and andouille are pretty old. However, it is surprising to find that ingredients such as apples and dried tomatoes are not modern foodie concoctions, but easily as old as fennel and garlic as sausage ingredients.
Another major epiphany I take from this book is the fact that along with pasta, canned tomatoes, olive oil, onions, garlic, parsley, anchovies, eggs, flour, milk and capers, sausage is one of the most versatile items one can have on hand in your pantry, as it can be used as a flavorful addition to a really wide variety of dishes. The only caveat is that fresh sausage must be frozen in order to keep it safe and it's frozen shelf life may not be much more than two months. Even so, this book will give you more than enough good ideas for using that sausage to keep you from forgetting about the stash of charcuterie goodness.
The book is divided up by three major topics. The first and shortest is on basic fresh sausage making techniques and the methods for hot and cold smoking fresh sausage. Even if you never use these techniques, the interested foodie should really know how these techniques work and what they do, so you are in a better position to make the best use of products of these two techniques. My biggest criticism with this book comes in this section which would have been much better done with a few good diagrams of various types of smoking devices. Most of this material would have been harder for me to appreciate had I not seen Alton Brown's popular `Good Eats' parody of `Iron Chef' where he cold smokes bacon with one of his typically McGyveresque contraptions.
The authors make simple sausage making sound easy, and with the right precautions, it really is. All you really need to convince yourself of this fact is to realize it is not much more than making meatloaf. The main concerns come with the care and sanitation involved in grinding the meat, as a dirty meat grinder is an open invitation to unwanted microbial beasties. And, while the book supplies sources for sausage making tools, I suggest you do the Martha Stewart routine of searching out tag sales for solid metal meat grinders you can probably get for a song.
The second major section covers recipes for making a wide variety of sausages. The chapters within this part cover:
American Sausages:
American Farmhouse Sausage with 10 recipes, including smoked sausage and chicken and apple sausage.
Southern Sausages with 9 recipes, including Boudin, Andouille, Chaurice, Tasso, and Pickled Pork.
Midwestern Sausages with 14 recipes influenced by Germany, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe.
Southwestern Sausages with 6 recipes influenced by Spain, including chorizo and poultry sausage.
Mediterranean Sausages with 13 recipes including Italian, Spanish, and Greek sausages.
Asian Style Sausages with 5 recipes including mushrooms, chicken, and shrimp.
Game and Seafood sausages with 12 recipes including salmon, duck, crawfish, buffalo, and venison.
The third major section (Part II) covers recipes for using sausage in dishes. Recipes are organized in ten (10) chapters on:
Breakfast All Day
Sausage Starters: Appetizers and Salads
Sausage Based Soups
Sausage Sandwiches and Pizzas
Lotta Pasta (and Sausage)
Better Beans and Grains
Sausage with Fish and Seafood
Cacklers and Gobblers: Poultry and Sausages
Red Meat and Sausage
Sausage Spiked Side Dishes
This is more than enough evidence to convince me to have sausage on hand on a regular basis. And, one piece of very good news is the fact that nitrites in sausage are no longer considered a health risk and by making your own sausage, you can avoid almost all the unwanted chemicals put into commercial sausage.
This is a foodie `must have' book!
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